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As promised in our release announcement, we have succeeded in trapping our dreaded foe, the 7.x-1.12 release, in a crypt of icy stasis. The Code Freeze is here!

All Islandora repositories should now have a 7.x-1.12 branch with .info files updated to reflect that they are locked in at version 7.x-1.12. The exception to this is Tuque, which now has a 1.12 branch. Component managers, please check your modules' repos to verify that this is the case and inform one of the release managers if you find an issue.

Testers and documenters, glory awaits you with the new Islandora 7.x-1.12 Release Candidate Virtual Machine! Use this to perform your sacred rites of testing and documenting, for it is your very own disposable dungeon full of monsters waiting to be discovered! (but hopefully not too many)

- Find the 7.x-1.12 VM here (be patient and maybe start downloading it before lunch, its 3.5GB and could take quite a while)

- Once downloaded, import it into VirtualBox

- Once running, you can access the VM through your browser at http://localhost:8000. Log in with the username "admin" and the password "islandora"

- You can also SSH inside the VM through the VirtualBox console using the username and password "vagrant"

WHAT SHOULD I BE DOING UNTIL THE RELEASE?

- Component Managers:

- Make sure there are no blockers for your module.

- Do your best to resolve any bugs before the release (and inform your testers to test them once merged)

- Try to resolve any bug PRs on your module in a timely manner

- Check merged PRs on your module to verify that all the related JIRA tickets were closed with a fix version of 7.x-1.12

- Reach out to the testers and documenters for your module to see if they need help

- Help find testers/documenters for your module if you don't have them

- Testers:

- Test all resolved JIRA tickets that have a fix version of 7.x-1.12. If you don't know what this entails, please contact the Testing Manager Carolyn Moritz (cmoritz@vassar.edu) or the Component Manager for your module.

Islandoracon is coming back! The third iteration of our conference will be held October 7 - 11th, 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The main conference will be hosted by Islandora Foundation Partner Simon Fraser University, at their downtown location in Harbour Centre. Stayed tuned to this blog and our listserv for updates about registration, a Call for Proposals, and more.

The Islandora Foundation is very pelased to announce our first event of 2019: Islandora Camp Switzerland, taking place June 17 - 19 in Dübendorf, Switzlerand. We are partnering with Islandora Foundation member Lib4RI to hold the camp at Eawag. While we won't be anouncing the full schedule until some time next year, we expect to follow the usual camp schedule of:

Day One: General and introductory sessions about the software and the community that uses and supports it

Day Two: Hand-on workshop training with tracks for Developers and front-end Administrative users, featuring both Islandora 7.x and Islandora CLAW

Day Three: Sessions on specific sites, tools, and topics of interest to Islandora users

The camp will kick off on the Monday directly following Open Repositories 2019, taking place in Hamburg, Germany, so if you're heading to OR, why not hang around for a weekend of sightseeing and join us as well?

Looking for Islandora events in North America? Stay tuned for dates and locations for Islandoracon.

Create a roadmap for the future of the Islandora platform, including tools and strategies for migration

The Technical Advisory Group (TAG for short) has been working on a prioritized list of upcoming features and improvements for Islandora CLAW to help guide its development. We're aiming to release Islandora CLAW (and drop the CLAW codename) after 7.x-1.12 is released. Once that happens, this roadmap will be used to set sprint goals and other development priorities. We're opening up the roadmap to review by the entire community, and are asking for your feedback. You can leave comments either in this google doc or in the individual Github issues. We've also ranked these issues using a Github project.

Priority was agreed upon following the general rule of providing "must-have" features before migration. In other words, features which, if missing, would prevent someone from adopting the software should receive higher priority. Documentation and examples involving migrations ranked first, with multi-site support following up second. Also on the list are features built around the Fedora API specification, UI/UX improvements, new derivatives, and a lot more.

If there's anything you think is missing that's high priority, feel free to leave a suggestion in the google doc, or create an issue on Github and give it the Roadmap label. This is your chance to help shape the development of the project, so if you really need something before migrating in, this is a good opportunity to have your voice heard. After this review, the finalized list of features will be presented to the Board of Directors for approval. Once approved, the roadmap will be prominently displayed on our web site to help give people a sense of the direction of the software.

As the brutal heat of the summer begins to fade, you find yourselves in a tavern, surrounded by the chatter of other Islandorans discussing Solr configs, new collections, and boasting about giant bugs bravely squashed. Suddenly, a dark shadow falls across the land. An imposing figure looms over the horizon: the dreaded Release has arisen again! Noble adventurers, are you brave enough to join forces and banish this ancient evil once and for all (or at least until the next release)?

Brandon Weigel and Bryan Brown, your trusted RMs (Release Managers), are preparing the ultimate open source campaign to test the mettle of even veteran release volunteers. There are plenty of open seats left at our table, and the party needs YOU to survive! Please choose from one of the following classes (multiclassing strongly encouraged):

Component manager

Tester

Auditor

Documentor

Last but not least, take a look at the tavern's jobs board to see what kinds of quests are still available. Remember, completing more quests gets you more experience points, and g̶o̶l̶d̶ kudos from your grateful community, so grab your sword and shield (or mouse and keyboard) and set a course for adventure!

With this announcement, the Islandora 7.x-1.12 campaign has officially begun. We plan to paralyze our foe in a Cone of C̶o̶l̶d̶Code Freeze on October 19. From there we battle its evil army of bugs, and finally send it to the shadow realm on November 30 - although experience has taught us that evils such as this are rarely beholden to mortal timetables…

The Islandora community has just wrapped up a very successful sprint dedicated to migrating from 7.x to Islandora CLAW. We at the Islandora Foundation want to give a big thanks to everyone who put in time during this sprint, as well as the organizations who lent us their talent on the company dime. We also want to give a special shout out to the Metadata Interest Group, who collectively put in a ton of time and tackled some intense questions for those who want to use a migration to Islandora CLAW as a chance to do metadata cleanup. During the course of two weeks, we managed to accomplish a lot. As of right now you can:

Migrate over objects based on content type

Migrate ALL the datastreams (except AUDIT, which is a special case)

Extract metadata from any XML datastream and make it a Drupal field

Model authorities such as people, organizations, and subjects

Convert MODS to CSV using Cara Key's (LSU) XML2CSV tool

There's still some work left to do, though. On the horizon for the near term, be on the look out for:

Migrating the AUDIT datastream

Modeling more/different types of authorities

Examples of extracting authorities from FOXML

A workflow for those who want to use OpenRefine to reconcile linked data authorities during the migration process

Moving forward, this is an excellent chance for people to try out the tools we're developing and point them at their existing repositories. Our migration tool, originally developed by Jared Whiklo (University of Manitoba), is available on Github. And if you want to give modeling authorities a go, check out our new controlled_access_terms module, which was made by Seth Shaw (University of Nevada Las Vegas). If anyone has feedback/issues/questions, please feel free to create an issue or post a message on the mailing list.
Here's a full list of all the people and organizations who helped make this once-considered-impossible feat a reality:

Benjamin Rosner - Barnard Collge, CU

Pat Dunlavey - Born-Digital

Andrija Sagic - Library "Milutin Bojic"

Ann McShane - Library Company of Philadelphia

Cara Key - Louisiana State University

Jason Peak - Louisiana State University

Jonathan Green - LYRASIS

Rachel Leach - Mount Holyoke College

Mark Jordan - Simon Fraser University

Adam Soroka - Smithsonian Institution

Rachel Tillay - Tulane University

Pete Clarke - University College Dublin

Jared Whiklo - University of Manitoba

Mike Bolam - University of Pittsburgh

Seth Shaw - University of Nevada Las Vegas

Paul Pound - University of Prince Edward Island

Rosie Le Faive - University of Prince Edward Island

Nat Kanthan - University of Toronto Scarborough

Marcus Barnes - University of Toronto Scarborough

Carolyn Moritz - Vassar College

Thanks to everyone involved! And if you missed out on this sprint, don't fret. We'll be holding another Islandora CLAW community sprint later this year after Islandora 7.x-1.12 is released.

Islandora Camp is going to be in San Diego, CA from November 7 to 9th. We'll be holding our standard three day camp, with two days of sessions and one day of hands-on training from experienced Islandora instructors. You can register for the camp and find out more here. Both workshop tracks will contain content exploring Islandora's next major version, which pairs Drupal 8 and Fedora 4, alongside more traditional training in the current release with Drupal 7 and Fedora 3. We are very pleased to announce that the instructors for our training workshop will be:

Admin Track

Melissa Anez has been working with Islandora since 2012 and has been the Community and Project Manager of the Islandora Foundation since it was founded in 2013. She has been a frequent instructor in the Admin Track and developed much of the curriculum, refining it with each new Camp. Lately she has been expanding the iCamp workshop to cover new ground with Islandora CLAW.

Katie Romabiles began working with Islandora in 2017 when she took on the new position of Institutional Repository Specialist for San Diego State University. Since then, she has helped with the migration of the university's IR from DSpace to Islandora and has developed new repository collections in collaboration with SDSU faculty and staff. She attended iCampEU in 2018, and is excited to give back to the Islandora community by acting as host and support instructor for iCampCA.

Developer Track

Jared Whiklo began working with Islandora in 2012. After stumbling and learning for a year, he began to give back to the community in late 2013. He has since assisted in both Islandora and Fedora releases and (to his own disbelief) has become an Islandora 7.x-1.x, Islandora CLAW, and Fedora committer. His day job is Developer with Digital Initiatives at the University of Manitoba Libraries. His night job is at the Kwik-E-Mart.

Mark Jordan has taught at three other Islandora Camps and at the Islandora Conference. He is the developer of numerous custom Islandora modules, including Islandora Context, Islandora Themekey, Islandora Datastream CRUD, and the XML Solution Pack. Mark is also one of the co-developers of the the Move to Islandora Kit. He is also an Islandora committer and is currently serving as Chair of the Islandora Foundation Board of Directors. His day job is as Head of Library Systems at Simon Fraser University.

California Revealed is a State Library initiative to help California’s public libraries, in partnership with other local heritage groups, digitize, preserve, and serve online historically significant Californiana (e.g., books, documents, audiovisual recordings).

Managed by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), the Frederick Douglass Papers collects, edits, and publishes in books and online the speeches, letters, autobiographies, and other writings of abolitionist, statesan, and renowned orator Frederick Douglass.

Part of the CAUL-CBUA Atlantic Islandora Repository Network (CAIRN) multi-site, this repository features items of importance to the history of NSCAD University, including a collection of digitized scrapbooks containing NSCAD memorabilia dating back to 1921, a collection of books authored by past principal Elizabeth Styring Nutt, a digitized audio archive of lectures, performances, and sound art, and a collection of digital theses by MFA, MDes, and MA graduates dating from 1975 to present.